Tag Archives: tabletop roleplaying games

I’m currently preparing to play a wizard in a D&D 5e game that a friend of mine is running (my first ever wizard, in fact. I prefer the sorcerer playstyle, but I wanted to branch out). My wizard is exceptional because, as part of a curse, he has perfect recall of his own memories and those of his parents and grandparents.

While I’ve played elves and other long-lived races before, this curse/blessing had me keenly considering the implications of a character with a very large scope of experience—specifically, how that large scope would impact that character’s approach to ethics, systems of right and wrong.

Goblin fruit grows in the Feywild and the Hedge that seperates it from the world of humans. Whithin these hypnagogic realms, there are millions of varieties of local flora ready to bring ruin or respite for anyone willing to pick them, but because of the dangers involved, and the mercurial nature of the lands of the Fair Folk, attempts to catalogue them have proven futile.

Here are some goblin fruits that your players might find in faerie realms or other magical verdant places. 5th Edition D&D rules are given, but hopefully it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to port them over to Changeling or any other system you please.

Prince of the Apocalypse, one of the official campaigns for 5th Edition D&D, has a side trek wherein your party travels to an abandoned house to negotiate with a black dragon. Cool, right? Well, in theory. When your adventuring party has eight people in it, “talking to a black dragon”, no matter how big it is, translates to “killing a black dragon and taking its stuff”. There was no amount of spooky foreboding that was going to divert this party’s urge for big-game hunting.

So, I had to redesign the encounter. In fact, I redesigned it on the spot. It helped that I had finished reading through Kiel Chenner’s The Hell House Beckons a few days before. Today, I went back to my notebook, transcribed what I’d written, cleaned it up a bit, added some stuff, and redrew the maps. Here’s the result.

Rundreth Manor was once a grand estate—a little remote, but when you’re wealthy, a little remote goes a long way. Something horrible happened here, though, and the manor fell into disrepair. Here’s how it stands now. All doors are made of wood and unlocked unless otherwise noted. Areas 6 and 12 through 16 are pitch-dark unless characters have fallen into them. Other rooms are lit by daylight.

I just played through my favorite character exit I’ve ever seen in person, and I’d love to tell you about it. It might brighten your day.

A local friend kicked off a 5th Edition D&D game a while ago, set in a Dark Souls-style dark fantasy setting. The other players were playing an orc hardboiled detective, a tiefling warlock whose familiar was a best-selling author, a kor cliff-acrobat, and, for some reason, a shifter monk who was basically the robot gorilla from the cover of the FATE Core Rulebook. I decided to play counter to the tone of the setting a little bit and made a firbolg druid, exiled from his forest home for political reasons. Firbolgs (which in 5e are blue-skinned forest-dwelling demi-giants, like how an elf might picture a giant) don’t have names, but the party ended up calling him Red, after his red hair. Red loved nature. Like, really loved it, with giddy enthusiasm. Think Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec with none of the organizational skill. He was the party’s two-hundred-fifty-pound medic and chef (he took the Gourmand feat), who could talk to animals and plants and be understood, but couldn’t receive a response without further magical aid. His spellcasting focus was a live squirrel. I decided to roll for my ability scores instead of doing point-buy, and ended up with pretty fantastic stats in everything but Intelligence. Red knew how to use every plant he’d ever seen, but had no idea what any of their names were. Firbolgs don’t have names, y’know?

Let’s kick this off with something uncontroversial: the ability to create and portray NPCs is one of the game master’s greatest tools, and NPCs can easily become the most memorable part of a tabletop roleplaying campaign (heck, BloodLetterPress is named after an NPC from a game that Nagi ran a few years ago). Here’s the problem: NPCs need to be written under a different set of principles from every other part of an adventure. Let’s look at how even the big names stumble, and how we can dodge or alleviate those problems and create some useful and memorable NPCs.